Monday, March 12, 2012

Progressive persuasion

by digby

Ezra Klein has written a much commented upon piece for the New Yorker in which he gathers data and lays out the case that presidential speeches are rarely effective at persuading the public of that which they don't already believe. This has been an ongoing debate among political chatterers for some time, with those who have been unhappy with the president generally arguing that he should take his case to the people vs those who say that it's pointless and that a president's success depends upon his or her ability to manipulate the institutions of power within their partisan constraints. (I'm being very simplistic. You should read the article for the whole thesis.)

As one of those who has always thought the president should take the progressive case to the people, I found the data persuasive .. and disappointing. Until near the end, where he wrote this:

“Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line of presidents who have not been able to transform the political landscape through their efforts at persuasion. When he succeeded in achieving major change, it was by mobilizing those predisposed to support him and driving legislation through Congress on a party-line vote.”

There you go. Of course presidents can't really "persuade" people of the opposing party in a polarized environment, for all the reasons Ezra lays out in his piece. But I feel as if this whole argument is about doing something that nobody but President Obama, op-ed writers and some of his more fervent followers ever thought was possible in the first place. They're the only ones who believed that the Republicans were going to fall at his feet and work together in bipartisan harmony --- or that his magical powers of persuasion would create a groundswell of support among Independents and rank and file Republicans.

When progressives called for President Obama to make speeches it wasn't with the goal that he lift his poll numbers or get Mitch McConnell to sign on. Indeed, that's the opposite of what they wanted --- the "Grand Bargains" required to get such a deal are worse than nothing at all from their perspective. The reason they wanted him to make speeches was to mobilize his followers to help "persuade" their representatives to pass progressive legislation --- or even just reaffirm his commitment to shared goals and educate the public about what those goals are.

The administration abandoned any notions of doing this shortly after the election, when they spun off the grassroots organization they'd built in the campaign so I suppose that was a bit of whistling in the dark as well. But Ezra's piece reaffirms that this is the way major change happens in this environment, so you can't really blame the progressives for pushing it. That's what they wanted --- major change. And in a bit of an ironic surprise, Ezra demonstrated that in this case, the progressives were the pragmatic sorts calling for "what works" --- not the president.